The Only Widow At The Couples Table

There are eight chairs at that table and seven of them are being used the way chairs are supposed to be used.

The hall is set up beautifully. Somebody has done a lot of work with jars and candles. And whoever wrote the seating list did it kindly, because they put her with the Hendersons, whom she likes, and the Ellises, who have known her forty years, and none of that is the problem.

The problem is arithmetic. Eight is an even number and she is an odd one, and so the chair on her right is either empty all evening or it is filled by whoever gets moved, and both of those are worse than the other one depending on the night.

Tonight it stayed empty. And at about the point where the plates went round, Marion leaned across and said, warmly, we should have sat you nearer the front, love, and put a hand on her arm, and she said oh, I am fine here, and looked at the candle.

Three years in November. In this church that is old news to everybody except the person it happened to.

Maybe your version is a wedding. Or a family photograph. Or the way the calendar has certain evenings in it now. Somewhere there is a room where the shape of your life is visible to everybody the second they count.

What the empty chair costs. Named before anything else

Nobody at that table has counted it, so let us.

It costs her about four suppers a year and every wedding since. It costs the ordinary experience of walking into a room without doing arithmetic at the door. It costs her the freedom to say a true sentence about him, because the true sentences are all three years old now and a table cannot hold them past about April.

And it costs her the hand on the arm, which is meant so well and which lands as a reminder that everybody in this hall has a settled opinion about her situation and nobody has asked her a question about it since the spring.

You have been counted at every door for three years, and God has never once seated you by an arithmetic. Psalm 68:6 says God sets the solitary in families, and the same Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it at an actual table with an actual candle on it. Nobody wrote you onto a list. You were placed.

Your Maker is your husband, and that is not a consolation

There is one line built for a woman at a table for eight.

For your Maker is your husband; the Lord of hosts is his name.Isaiah 54:5

Read who is speaking and what He calls Himself. Not a comforter for the meantime. Not a stand in until things improve. Your Maker. The one who made her, taking the word that has been the sorest word in her vocabulary for three years and putting it on Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that from being a nice sentiment and makes it something that sits down beside her.

You are not the odd one at that table, and the seat beside you was taken before the list was written. That is not me being gentle with a hard evening. The written word puts the Maker and the husband in one clause and does not qualify it, and the Spirit is the one who makes an ancient promise into company at a supper. Marion counted seven and one. He counted differently.

And this must be said or the whole thing turns cruel. Your widowhood is not a display. It was not arranged so that a congregation could learn something about faithfulness by watching you come to things alone. God did not take a good man in November to make a point in a church hall. You are not an exhibit and you never were.

The article does not fix the seating plan

I am not going to give you a way to make eight into an odd number, or a line to say to Marion. There is not one, and a line like that would be a ninth thing to carry into a hall that already takes the count out of you.

What can change is who you are seated beside while the plates go round. Two things are true at that table, and only one of them arrived before you did.

You have a place that was set rather than assigned, and the setting of it did not depend on a pair. Psalm 139:5 says He has hemmed you in behind and before, and it is His Spirit who makes that mean a chair on your right rather than a doctrine about omnipresence.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the evenings alone have gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you call anybody at church. That is not grief failing. That is God sending help with hands and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.